slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea!

She wondered in her weary soul whether these horrors, which literature
had made familiar to her, were much worse than the smart white and gold
cabin of the good ship _Fanny_, filled to overflowing with the contents
of half-a-dozen nurseries.

Towards daybreak there came a lull. The crossest of the babies had
exhausted its capacity for making its fellow-creatures miserable. The
sea-sick mothers and nurses had left off groaning, and starting
convulsively from their pillows, with wild shrieks for the stewardess,
and had sunk into troubled slumbers. Vixen turned her back upon the
dreadful scene--dimly lighted by flickering oil-lamps, like those that
burn before saintly shrines in an old French cathedral--and shut her
eyes and tried to lose herself in the tangled wilderness of sleep. But
to-night that blessed refuge of the unhappy was closed against her. The
calm angel of sleep would have nothing to do with a soul so troubled.
She could only lie staring at the port-hole, which stared back at her
like a giant's dark angry eye, and waiting for morning.

Morning came at last, with the skirmishing toilets of the children,
fearful struggles for brushes and combs, towel fights, perpetual
clamour for missing pieces of soap, a great deal of talk about strings
and buttons, and a chorus of crying babies. Then stole through the
stuffy atmosphere savoury odours of breakfast, the fumes of coffee,
fried bacon, grilled fish. Sloppy looking cups of tea were administered
to the sufferers of last night. The yellow sunshine filled the cabin.
Vixen made a hasty toilet, and hurried up to the deck. Here all was
glorious. A vast world of sunlit water. No sign yet of rock-bound
island above the white-crested waves. The steamer might have been in
the midst of the Atlantic. Captain Winstanley was on the bridge,
smoking his morning cigar. He gave Violet a cool nod, which she
returned as coolly. She found a quiet corner where she could sit and
watch the waves slowly rising and falling, the white foam-crests slowly
gathering, the light spray dashing against the side of the boat, the
cataract of white roaring water leaping from the swift paddle-wheel and
melting into a long track of foam. By-and-by they came to Guernsey,
which looked grim and military, and not particularly inviting, even in
the morning sunlight. That picturesque island hides her beauties from
those who only behold her from the